


Maybe Once, Maybe Twice

by narcolepticbadger



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 14:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20211142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narcolepticbadger/pseuds/narcolepticbadger
Summary: Ruth was the last fucking person he needed to have sifting through the remnants of his damaged heart, but, here he was, cutting straight across those arbitrary lines he had tried to draw between them and practically shoving the pieces into her hands. And there she was, letting him.Sam doesn't call. Ruth comes anyway. [Missing scene from 3x07]





	Maybe Once, Maybe Twice

He remembered telling Justine he was proud of her—desperate to tell her that, and desperate to get away before he took a less-than-dignified nosedive into the street in front of her—and then things got hazy for him.

That jackhammer feeling in his chest roaring up into his head. Sirens. Some asshole poking him in the arm and asking questions that flowed one into another, all one big mess of noise that wouldn’t leave him alone. 

There was Justine again, fading in and out of his peripheral vision and looking like someone had shot her dog, and Sam had tried to say_everything’s okay, everything’s gonna be fine _but he wasn’t sure he ever got the words out clearly, and, if he had, it had done fuck-all to reassure Justine that he wasn’t, in fact, actively dying. 

(He couldn’t blame the kid; it was hard to take those kinds of promises at face-value when the person making them didn’t have control over their own body anymore, could barely breathe around the panic jumping in their throat. _He _hadn’t even fucking believed himself.)

And now he was in the hospital, exhausted and embarrassed and an entirely new brand of miserable, and Justine had disappeared a suspiciously long time ago to hunt down some coffee and never returned, leaving him to count the knells of his own heartbeat in time with whatever machine they had hooked him up to and—what else?—plumb the depths of his self-loathing. 

It was better this way, to be honest.

Hospitals had a way of revealing too much of someone. There were those bullshit paper gowns they made you wear, sure, but it was the sickness, too, that came pouring out and left you stupidly vulnerable, that let people see who you really were. 

All of the ugly truths he could hide under his bluster, under his fuck-off attitude that kept people exactly where he wanted them: a good five feet away and, oh, _miles _beyond that if he was counting in emotional distance. 

(Which of course he always was.) 

Washed-up. Pathetic. A lonely old bastard who was practically on his last legs after years of running roughshod over everything that had drifted into his orbit, and who had a whole hell of a lot of nothing to show for it. 

All of that was laid bare in the shitty half-light of his room for even the best-intentioned vultures to pick through and discard when they realized there was nothing worth saving; so, yeah, he was _grateful _Justine hadn’t decided to stick around and play witness to this rather spectacular all-time low of his. 

Fuck, he wished she hadn’t been there to see _any _of it. That had been the whole point of ignoring the symptoms of his little ‘cardiac event’ (every idiot could recite the tell-tale signs of a heart attack backwards and forwards, even him) until they were done with their meetings—brushing off the jolting pain in his arm and the tightening in his lungs until he could collapse in an alley somewhere and be spared the humiliation of buying the farm in front of his daughter.

It should have been the best day of her life, landing a movie deal on her first script—a fucking _good _script, the kind he could only dream of writing—and instead Sam had made her cry, wasting away too many hours in the cramped torture devices that passed for chairs here. 

“Father of the fucking year,” he muttered to the empty room, dragging a hand down his face. “I should just—”

A quiet knock on the door stopped him, and he recognized Ruth almost before he really saw her, even though his world had been rendered in soft focus since they took his glasses off in the ambulance, even though it was too absurd to be real. 

“Hey,” she said, standing there like she couldn’t make up her mind about coming or going, one step short of crossing the threshold. 

“Christ, just take me out back and fucking shoot me already.” He closed his eyes briefly, cracked one to fix a glare on her. “I suppose it’s too late to play dead and wait for you to go away?”

Only Ruth would smile at that, taking it as an invitation to come in, come closer, until she was hovering just out-of-reach by the edge of his bed.

“And here I was worried this place would put a damper on your sparkling personality.”

Her words were light, her mouth still softened at the corners as she looked him over, taking in the wires and the grey tinge of his skin—why did she have to _look _at him?—but there was something hollow behind the lightness, as if she’d crack right open under anything but the most careful of touches. 

“Yeah, yeah, the charm made it through unscathed. The heart not so much.” 

He grimaced to hear it spoken aloud, like it wasn’t his own doing. His voice was too rough, too bitter to be referring only to the heart attack when he hadn’t meant to imply more, but then things always did have a way of complicating themselves whenever Ruth got involved. 

A dart of worry creased the spot between her eyebrows. “But you're fine now, right?”

“Oh, peachy.”

“Sam—” 

“What the hell are you even doing here, Ruth? You have a show to do.” He cut her off sharply, in no mood to spend the next hour, even the next thirty seconds, tiptoeing around whatever idiotic pretense had brought her back here. “You know, all that girl-on-girl wet dream fodder, bad Russian accents and even worse puns, about 200 miles to the east?” 

If the taunt stung her (_see? you get mean _echoing through his ears loud enough to make his teeth ache), she showed no outward sign. “Come on, they can survive without Zoya for one night.” 

“Since when can you let the show do _anything _without being there to give your notes on it, without having your finger in every pie?” 

“Since…” She flicked her gaze up to his and back to the floor, then shook her head, changed course mid-sentence. “_You _left, and the show didn’t fall apart.”

There was more than a hint of accusation buried in the words, like after all this time she still wanted to pry a proper explanation, or maybe an apology, out of him. Like _he _had been the one to hurt _her _by trying to move on from something that had stalled, irreparable, before it had ever begun. 

“You take the cameras away, run the same matches night after night,” he held up a hand when she started to protest, “no, listen, what did you need me for? To play referee? To cheerlead from the sidelines? I wasn’t doing anyone any good out there.” 

Ruth made a huffing noise of disbelief. “And you’re doing so much better here?”

“Clearly,” he spat, matching her tone, but even that brief sparring match was enough to exhaust what little strength he had, and he slid back against the pillows feeling dizzy and carelessly high, and not in a fun way. “Fuck.” 

Ruth was the last fucking person he needed to have sifting through the remnants of his damaged heart, but, here he was, cutting straight across those arbitrary lines he had tried to draw between them and practically shoving the pieces into her hands.

And there she was, letting him. 

“Sam?” She touched his shoulder gently, the heat from her skin sending a charge of electricity straight through to his core before he flinched from this unwelcome reminder of what she, so easily, could do to him. “Shit, are you in pain? Should I get the doctor?”

There was a high note of fear in the questions she asked, in how she kept her hand on his arm even after he had tried to pull away, and Sam hated how much he wanted this, these crumbs of warmth and care that Ruth managed to give both too freely and so scarcely he couldn’t be sure they existed in any place outside of his fevered imagination. 

_Be honest,_ he had written to her, as if it were so simple. _Be honest. Be fucking—_

“Yeah, I got a huge pain right in my ass,” he groaned, taking the easy way out, and nodded towards her pointedly. When she realized he was teasing her, she rolled her eyes at him, dramatic to the last, and he managed half a grin, his shitty version of saying _sorry for scaring you_. Of saying sorry for a lot of things he had done. 

It was enough to ease the tension in the room and slow the confused racing of his heart, and then both of them were laughing a bit, happy to find familiar footing—or at least an approximation of it—with each other again. 

Softer now, he said, “I think I’ll live,” and she smiled at him for real, turning to drag one of the hideous visitor chairs up to the side of the bed and folding herself into it and (Sam despised himself for thinking it) looking like she belonged there: next to him, still smiling over some dumb thing he had said, beautiful in the dim light and, hopelessly, _his_. 

“Look, we don’t have to talk about the show, or about Vegas.”

“Do we have to talk about anything?”

It was the wrong thing to say, apparently, because she stiffened, took on that breakable look he had seen when she first slipped into the room. “Sorry, I, I just—”

“No,” he said, brushing aside her apologies. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s… uh, it’s good to see you, Ruth.” 

“Yeah?” she asked, sounding crushingly hopeful—so uncertain, always, of his sincerity. 

“Yeah,” he said, meaning it, even if the _good _part was mixed up with a whole host of other, less pleasurable feelings. “What, I don’t get a ‘it’s good to see you too, Sam’?” 

She shook her head a little, distracted, big eyes tracing a path over his face with an expression that made him feel horribly defenseless, the scrutiny as piercing as he had known it would be. 

“You know,” she said, cocking her head thoughtfully, “you look different without your glasses. How much can you even see?” 

“I mean, everything looks like a fucking impressionist painting, but, hey—” He caught the hand Ruth had started waving in front of his nose with his own, lowering it so he could look at her now, properly. “I can see _you_, Helen Keller.” 

“Oh.” 

It was less a word than a breath, something half-swallowed as Ruth grew serious, turning her face away with a flush of confusion he didn’t understand until she shifted in his hold: he had never let go of her hand, lightly pinning it against the mattress between them, and with every passing second the contact became too lingering to be mistaken for anything casual. 

He disentangled himself with a muttered curse, fingers and cheeks scalding as he withdrew, and the pair of them acted like teenagers who had been discovered necking under the bleachers, not knowing how to escape the nervous energy that threatened to strangle the room. 

He cleared his throat (it sounded like he was fucking choking, and that would actually be a mercy), trying to wade back to safer ground. “So, uh, how did you know I was in here, anyway?” 

“Justine called.”

“Knew it. That little Judas, selling me out.” Sam couldn’t be mad at her, not really—he had proven himself useless at providing any of the sort of grown-up comfort or security Justine might need under the circumstances—but, Jesus, he wished she hadn’t decided to call in the troops just yet. “Is she okay?”

“You scared the shit out of her.” 

“Yeah, well,” his turn to balk, fiddling with the blanket, “I didn’t mean to.”

“No, of course not. You didn’t land yourself in here on purpose.” Ruth frowned, shooting him a strange, searching look. “She fell asleep in the visitors lounge. I tried to tell her you’d want her to go home, sleep in a real bed, but she wouldn’t hear it.” 

“Ah, she’s young. Give her a night of being drawn and quartered in those fucking metal chairs, and she’ll learn real quick.” 

Ruth hummed in agreement, slouching further into her own chair until her head rested on the back, low enough to share his sightline: a lazy, settled posture that could not possibly be comfortable for more than a minute or two for all she seemed to have no intention of leaving any time soon. 

“You don’t have to stay just because you feel sorry for me.”

“I know that.”

“So?” He levered himself up on one elbow, gesturing towards the door. “I’m giving you an out, stupid. Take it.”

She shrugged, unimpressed. “I want to stay.” 

“Don’t give me that bullshit, nobody _wants _to stay in a hospital. Go see Russell—remember him? Your boyfriend?”

Ruth scowled at him, like he was the one being difficult. “I came to see _you_, Sam. I thought, maybe, we…” She trailed off, the air suddenly weighted with those sentences she kept leaving unfinished. “Do you really want to be here alone?”

“I…” 

_I want you to stay_, he thought, sickly, almost punch-drunk enough to say it. Hell, he had already said it all, hadn’t he, in the hot tub and a thousand times before whenever Ruth had strayed dangerously close to the line and it came spilling out; an open wound. _I want so much more than that. _

Having Ruth near when he was like this—fucking wrecked by the day, prone to any passing tenderness, without even his glasses to take the edge off of her gaze—left him weak in a way that had nothing to do with his heart (or everything, maybe, depending which way you held it up to the light), and all he could do was beg her to read it in his eyes, to make it easy for him, to understand that what he wanted and what he could withstand in the absence of that were two excrutiatingly different things. 

She waited for his answer, unblinking but going as still as an animal that knew it was walking among land mines, and Sam sighed, and confessed as much of himself as he dared. 

“Just… don’t expect me to be much of a conversationalist.”

“Okay,” she said, quietly, relieved almost, as she let herself to relax again. “You should probably rest anyway, you look like you’re about to pass out.” 

“Wow, telling me I look like shit,” he chuckled viciously. “Nice bedside manner you got there, doc.”

“I didn’t say you looked like shit! You look, well, I mean, you look like you just had a minor heart attack, but it’s not so… _bad_, exactly?” 

“High praise coming from you.” 

There they went: slipping back into their old banter, that exasperating, effortless push-pull that had sparked between them from the very beginning. As _friends_, of course, and then collaborators, both of them choosing to ignore the unsettling undercurrent of attraction that ran underneath every word, which—classic fucking mistake—just allowed it build and build into this quandary that was going to eat them alive. 

_I think we have what everybody else is looking for. _Christ, he had really said that. Even worse, he had believed it, until Ruth hadn’t quite been able to look at him afterwards, trying in her own artless way to let him down gently. 

But, they _did _have something different. Their own shorthand. Their own secret club. Alma and fucking Hitch, working seamlessly together, and all of it perfect, and all of it unbearable. 

“I brought a book. Want me to read—” 

“No.”

“You didn’t let me finish.” 

“If it’s not contraband, I’m not interested. And somehow I don't have you pegged as much of a rule-breaker.” 

Ruth, wrinkling her nose at him, reached for her bag anyway. “Oh, wait, I have a card for you. Everyone signed it.” 

As it turned out, ‘card’ was an incredibly charitable term for what she thrust into his lap. 

“It’s a folded piece of paper.”

“Not a lot of options at the casino. It’s the thought that counts, right?” 

Flipping the cover open, Sam was met with an inky muddle of names and messages, little scribbled hearts dotted in one corner, all cramped onto the page so that he had to squint to make sense out of any of it, only to give it up when the motion kickstarted his headache anew.

“Yeah, sure. What’d you have to do to get them all to sign it—threaten to take over as director if I croaked?” 

“No! They wanted to, Sam.” 

He barked out a sharp laugh, deep enough to knock something painful loose under his ribcage, because, really, Ruth should know she could only ask him to stretch the bounds of his credulity so much. 

“Hey, I’m serious. You almost had fourteen female wrestlers descend on this place, in full costume, and probably still drunk from hitting up the airport bar.” 

She was earnest now, leaning forward to underscore her point, practically halfway onto the bed. “You should be thanking me for talking them out of that plan. Unless you’d prefer Dawn and Stacey’s company over mine? Or Sheila offering to lick your wounds?”

“God, no, you’re more than enough.” 

It was supposed to be an insult, but there was a hitch under it that set Ruth’s eyes crinkling at the corners, troubled. Ever the bleeding heart. 

“You have people too, Sam. People who care when you’re hurt.” She paused, delivering a playful nudge to his shoulder. “Even if you are an asshole most of the time.” 

“Hmm.” 

He was amused despite himself—somehow he never minded when it was Ruth calling him an asshole. He could argue with her over that first claim, would have any other day, but the idea of going ten rounds over semantics when he was sinking further and further towards sleep compelled him to shut his eyes instead, seeking any exit from the conversation he could find.

Fuck, he was tired. And all too aware that Ruth was still propping herself up on the edge of his mattress, scant inches away, plowing ahead with her speech like she had it memorized, like she was running lines, intent on finishing the scene whether she had an audience or not. 

“You have Justine, and the rest of the girls, and Bash, and…” 

An interminably long beat of silence, then, so softly Sam wondered if it might be his own wishful thinking, half a dream: 

“...me.” 

So much for feigning sleep. He blinked, readjusting to the vague light of the room and angling his head towards where Ruth had frozen, finally running out of words. She was biting at her lower lip, worrying the skin hard enough to rub it raw, and determinedly not-quite-looking back at Sam. 

_You have me_. Not a particularly eloquent admission (if it even counted as one), nothing earth-shattering for all Ruth looked like she was about to bolt for the hills, and Sam didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to do with that. 

“Ruth, you don’t need to—” 

“I guess what I mean is—” 

They started talking over each other, stopped, and he gestured for her to continue, but the moment was gone: Ruth was retreating to her chair, the legs grating against the floor as she pushed away, shuttering herself to him again. 

“You just wanted to see me in one of these stupid gowns, huh?” he cracked, when the silence became oppressive. “Great blackmail material.” 

“It’s definitely a perk.” She offered him a weak smile, and the way her eyes skimmed the exposed line of his collarbone raised goosebumps in places he had forgotten existed. “By the way, if anyone here asks, we’re married.”

That was a hot slap back to reality. “What? _Why? _”

“It’s family only after 6pm. Justine told the nurses that I was your wife so they’d let me in.” 

“You're fucking kidding me. What moron bought that story?” 

“I don’t think they really cared one way or another.” She shrugged, indifferent, then suddenly restless as she darted a glance at him. She spoke a little too quickly, the words rushing together in the middle. “Though… it’s not so crazy, is it? This isn’t the first time people have mistaken us for—”

“Don’t start, Ruth,” he half-snapped, then swallowed hard when he saw her wounded expression. “Not now, okay?” 

She nodded, curling her arms tighter around herself, making herself small, which made Sam feel like even more of a magnificent prick than usual. 

“So what’s it about?” he asked gruffly. “That book you brought.” 

Tentative at first but soon overtaken by her own eagerness, she launched into a full history of _Miss Julie _and its impact on naturalistic theater, so meandering (so _Ruth_) that it took a full five minutes for him finally latch on to exactly what she was talking about. 

“Wait, Strindberg, _really?”_ he interrupted, laughing.

“It’s Sheila’s,” she insisted, laughing too. “I just grabbed whatever was on the table. I, uh, had to run to make the next flight out, so.”

“You didn’t _have _to do anything.” 

Her face changed, uncomfortably candid again. Disappointed in him. “Yeah, I did.” 

“Okay, okay, just read. Earn your keep.” He chuckled, staring at the ceiling to avoid the ferocity of her gaze. “Strindberg. Fuck.” 

Of course, Ruth could never _just _do anything, and reading was no exception. Always the consummate performer, she put on different voices for all the characters, read the stage directions in a Swedish accent that kept dipping, much to Sam’s amusement, a little too far towards Zoya to be anything but ridiculous. 

It was nice, listening to the continuous murmur of her voice while he drifted in and out of awareness, the thread of her voice holding him together. Holding _them _together.

Sometime during the night, he imagined, maybe, that he felt two small-but-sure hands tucking the hospital blanket more snugly around him, pausing to idle over the place in his chest where his heart thrummed—damaged, yes, but perhaps not so ruined as he had thought. 

And maybe he imagined her pressing the barest graze of a kiss against his forehead, too.

.

.

He woke at some uncertain time, night and day fused into a single disorienting fog, and lay in a half-lidded stupor as his brain worked out the unfamiliar surroundings, sorted through a blur of events that may or may not have happened entirely as he remembered them. 

Heart attack. Hospital. Ruth.

A simple enough equation when broken down into its basic parts, but somehow Sam still couldn’t quite quell the flicker of surprise that caught at him whenever he hit upon her name. 

Even knowing she had been the one to rearrange the scattering of belongings on the bedside table: propping the disheveled paper card against a little pot of daffodils that had appeared overnight, folding the arms of his glasses down and setting them neatly away from the ledge.

Even knowing she was currently tangled up in the bedsheets with him.

Or, not exactly—she was sprawled over the edge of the bed, her head resting just beside his and skimming the curve of his shoulder, and one hand curled against his side, fingers twisted into the fabric of his hospital gown. His own arm was draped protectively over her back, though he had no memory of reaching for her (more impossibly, _finding _her) at all. 

The position they had fallen into was fucking killing him, pins and needles pricking through every inch of muscle, but he was loath to disturb Ruth when she looked so peaceable, when he could study the fine details of her face without having to take it in slow, stolen glances. 

Mussed hair and parted lips. Breath warming the skin of his neck on every exhale. The tremble of her eyelids as she dreamed. 

But then, too soon, she was stirring and blinking up at him, smiling hazily in a way that made his stomach clench (and that was the one thing he couldn’t forgive Ruth for, turning him into such a fucking _romantic)_, and altogether a great deal less disconcerted to find herself waking up so close to him than he had expected. 

She straightened, stopping abruptly with a hiss when the new kinks in her neck and back announced themselves. “Ow.” 

He smirked, trying to rub the feeling back into his deadened arm. “What did I tell you? You should have stayed at your boyfriend’s house.”

“I think I liked you better when you were unconscious.”

There was a strange sense of delaying the inevitable, both of them moving too slowly through the routine tasks of getting ready for the day—Sam retrieving his glasses, plucking at his clothes as if he could somehow make himself more presentable; Ruth stretching, collecting her Strindberg from the floor—until finally Ruth couldn’t figure out a reason to keep fiddling at the zipper of her bag any longer. 

“I should find Justine. She’ll want to see you.”

“Yeah, okay.” 

But neither of them made a move to do anything but sit there, listening to the measured beep of the heart monitor and looking haltingly across the bed at one another, still laying everything right on that goddamn line as if what had come into singular, shattering focus last night had changed nothing at all. 

And yet…

(Ruth biting her lip, asking.)

And yet, maybe they could still get this right. 

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try.

**Author's Note:**

> Because I could NOT accept that bullshit hospital scene they gave us on the show, I had to write my own. Wow wow wow S3 hit me like a ton of bricks, and it hurts. 
> 
> Come say hi or yell with me about these idiots on tumblr at @loveexpelrevolt!


End file.
